KLUG Weekly Meeting Notes

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

LDAP 107: BUILDING A FEDERATED DIRECTORY

OpenLDAP Software is an open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). In a continuing series of technicalpresentations focused at Linux network service administration, Adam used his Toshiba laptop running SuSE Pro v9.3 and OpenOffice.org's Impress software with the KLUG InFocus SVGA projector to give us an outstanding lesson in building a federated LDAP directory service. Adam fielded questions during and after the presentation with plentyof pragmatism and humor.

Adam explained and demonstrated the flexibility of ODBC compatible relational datasources being incorporated in the LDAP directory service. Grabbing data from your RDB accounting application, Customer Relationship Management(CRM) application, Contact Management System (CRS), and other available LDAP directory datasources appears to be a very powerful business-to-business communication implementation. If businesses made their LDAP directories publicly available they could bemore easily accessed by customers and vendors. Why be afraid of spammers getting the addresses? Your primary objective is to be accessible. Let yourmail server filter the spammers.

During the presentation, Adam showed us how to construct a multipledatasource LDAP server using OpenGroupware.org software with the PostgreSQL database. We saw that LDAP uses the back-sql interface to access the SQL database. Adam also detailed the structures and hierarchies the five configuration tables he constructed to define the parameters. We saw the configuration of slapd.conf. A brief description of Proxy Cache was made with more to comelater. We were shown that the configuration for Global Federation can be done so public LDAP directory services can be accessed as needed or proxied.

LDAP 108 will cover the new OpenLDAP version 2.3 release.LDAP 109 will cover the use of Proxy Cache in more detail.